15 Apr Making Britain Relevant Again
It’s a British peculiarity that we love reminding ourselves that we are no longer the great power we once were, while continuing to talk of our foreign policy in a way that presupposes we have a responsibility for everything everywhere. As though if not exactly the global policeman, at least a kind of international brains trust. David Miliband’s “better world, better Britain” and William Hague’s “active and activist” foreign policy were followed by Boris Johnson’s “world-beating Global Britain” and Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” – British-led (of course).
We have no reason to be defeatist. To quote an earlier Foreign Secretary (Douglas Hurd), we still “punch above our weight” in many fields, from science and technology to our armed forces (depleted as they are) and intelligence services, from our great museums to the Premier League. We are among the privileged heirs of the English language, which benefits us both in the multilateral world as well as in trade, education, soft power and beyond. Our professional services are in such demand worldwide that some of the largest potential markets do their best to protect their own professionals from British competition. To all these forms of valuable “hard” and “soft” power, we should certainly add preserving economic strength as one of the most important: whatever your politics, it’s hard to disagree with a focus on growth.
But in today’s new geopolitical – and of course geoeconomic – era, we need to take a hard strategic look at where we want to go. To use the language of business, our “market positioning”. We aren’t an imperial power. Nor can we be the Greece to America’s Rome: even if Trump II turns out to be a parenthesis, that role has been abolished for good and the vacancy won’t be readvertised in four years’ time. Nor do we have the luxury of going through several years of domestic upheaval in order to rejoin a European Union which has, in our absence, evolved further in a protectionist direction which makes it a significantly less good fit for the innovative technology and services which will make up so much of our comparative advantage in tomorrow’s world.
Like fish that can’t see water, we have grown up with assumptions it’s hard to shake off. Throughout my time as a diplomat, our foreign policy muscle memory evolved to look first to the US for security and to see almost everything else of international importance through the prism of trade-offs in the EU. Reflexes like that are hard to change. As is the imperialist reflex which preceded it: we are still programmed to lecture “lesser nations” on how to behave while being astonished when J D Vance (rightly or wrongly) does the same to us.
However we might like the world to be different, we are where we are and we need to adjust accordingly. As a second-tier power with a great deal to trade (literally and metaphorically) with the world, we need to develop a more agile and flexible set of reflexes, with the aim of being one of the world’s most in demand partners. We need to be prepared to work with (almost) everyone: the US, the EU, India and, yes, China too. We need to be open to opportunities while always alive to risks – and crucially with a firm eye on our fundamental interests as well as on the second-order consequences of our choices. And if we want to be a fast-growing twenty-first century scale up, we should make common ground with the best of them, including our partners in the CPTPP, which makes up already more than 15% of global trade and offers us great potential in areas of our comparative strength for the twenty-first century. Labour, which had not always been so enthusiastic about the grouping, was absolutely right last December to celebrate our full accession to the Treaty.
The new world we find ourselves in calls for clarity about where our real interests lie, in both security and prosperity. We need to abandon any vestiges of imperial thinking, including the grandiose idea that we are destined to be the leader of the west. Today, talking of leading without winning is the language of the press release, not a serious foreign policy. With market turmoil and conflict on our continent, we can’t predict where precisely our foreign and trade policies will have to turn in the coming years, but we can begin to set out on a new agile approach to the future. It’ll be hard to shake off the old reflexes, but there’s no better moment to start than now.
